


ouroboros

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Implied Jon/Elias, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, background Peter/Martin, is 'unhealthy relationship' implied by the pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 00:40:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20017411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “You know,” Jonah says, a muscle in his calf quivering agreeably where it’s slung over Mordechai’s shoulder, “it’s really quite--fortunate--that I don’t care for you at all.”





	ouroboros

“You know,” Jonah says, a muscle in his calf quivering agreeably where it’s slung over Mordechai’s shoulder, “it’s really quite--fortunate--that I don’t care for you at all.”  
  
“My dear Jonah,” Mordechai says, pausing in his self-appointed task of licking tenderly at the fragile skin just under Jonah’s hip bone, which causes Jonah to shiver wonderfully beneath him, “are you blind?” 

“Oh,” Jonah says dismissively, which is a feat considering that his prick is a bright red arch against his navel, “I like what you do to me.” His hand fists in Mordechai’s hair. “I like various _parts_ of you immensely. But you?”  
  
Jonah’s scoff turns into a gasp when Mordechai narrows his eyes and kisses the base of his prick. “Me, I’m no good,” Mordechai agrees, and blows a warm puff of air onto the head. Jonah makes a stifled noise behind his teeth. “Pity you’re in love with me.”  
  
Jonah sneers at him even as his prick twitches and drools clear fluid onto his belly. “You forget that I know you,” he says, and shudders when Mordechai finally takes him into his mouth. “I know what a hollow, hungry thing you are.” His hips tremble under Mordechai’s hands. “What on earth is there to love?”  
  
Jonah is telling the truth. He doesn’t believe there’s enough of Mordechai left to really love, the way Jonah might have been able to love another person. He thinks Mordechai is a fog in the shape of a man, an endless hunger disguising itself as a person. Mordechai finds this hurtful, although he supposes Jonah would know.

But of course Jonah _is_ in love with him. Mordechai can feel it, the unhappy ache in Jonah’s chest, his certainty that Mordechai isn’t really human making his prick harder even as it makes him miserable somewhere deeper, in his all-too-human bones. Jonah is never lonelier than when Mordechai is in his bed. 

Mordechai loves it.  
  
“I love you,” he whispers when he’s buried in Jonah’s body, working slowly between his thighs. Jonah goes stiff and furious, hisses “ _Liar_ ” into Mordechai’s chin, but he started this game so he can’t really object to Mordechai finishing it. “I’m not lying, you suspicious man,” Mordechai says tenderly, and anyone but Jonah Magnus would believe him. “If I could stay with you, I would.”  
  
Jonah bites him, because he’s a spiteful little thing. Mordechai laughs and gasps at the same time, and Jonah doesn’t bother soothing the bruise with his tongue before sucking hard at the skin, so Mordechai makes his voice go rough and sincere and adds, like it’s being dragged out of him, “God, Jonah, if I could love anyone, it would be you.” Jonah makes a small hurt noise that goes straight through Morechai’s prick to Mordechai’s god, then comes off between their bodies.

The thing is, Jonah is the chosen vessel of an all-knowing, all-seeing God of omniscience. If anyone were going to know better than to fall in love with an avatar of Isolation, it would be him.  
  
Mordechai is honestly worried he’ll never find anyone as masochistic as Jonah again, when Jonah dies.

“I hate you,” Jonah murmurs against his chest, after Mordechai has used him to his satisfaction.  
  
Mordechai smiles, pleasantly exhausted. “Liar.”  
  
He loves the little scowl Jonah gives him for that, really and truly.  
  
*  
  
Of course Jonah is too clever to die for very long.  
  
Mordechai is baffled and delighted to find himself unexpectedly entangled for centuries. It’s a common misconception that love is a way to combat loneliness. New adepts are always counselling victims to think about their loves, their connections, and use it to pull themselves out of isolation. But the truth is that love feeds loneliness more often than beating it back. He learns to love finding Jonah--and then Lucian, then James, then Elias--and finding new ways to feed himself on a seemingly endless source of longing.  
  
He’s aware the Eye is feeding on Mordechai--and Freddy, and Peter--just as much as he’s preying on Elias. The fog is usually impenetrable to the Eye, and Peter is well aware that he’s given Elias a better and closer look into the empty world than any agent of the Beholding has managed in centuries.  
  
It’s a mutually parasitic relationship, in other words. Elias loves him, Peter loves that Elias loves him, and together and apart they make each other quite happily miserable.  
  
(Oh, they fight, of course--Elias’s little Archivist ruining the work of centuries was a blow, even though Peter was never under any illusion that Elias would allow his feelings for Peter to interfere with his service to his own God--but it was still a blow. Not even the grinding misery of Elias’s love and loyalty scraping up against each other was enough to soften it. But not even a decade later and Peter found himself back between Elias’s thighs, looking forward to leaving him in the morning. Things tend towards equilibrium.)  
  
Peter has no real expectation that anything will change.  
  
*  
  
“What a fetching assistant you have,” Peter comments on his way into Elias’s office, freckles and worry-bitten lips and a deep, aching loneliness still claiming his attention. “However do you restrain yourself?”  
  
Elias gives him a restrained, wintry smile. “Unlike others I could name, I’m capable of delayed gratification.”  
  
Peter leers at him, and Elias rolls his eyes. “Consider him a perk of the position, if it’ll help you come to a decision.”  
  
Peter is going to accept the offer, of course, and they both know it. But all good business deals are sealed with a meal, which is why Peter came in person instead of replying to Elias’s letter. He intends to feast.  
  
Elias sighs, then has the audacity to check his watch.  
  
“I’m the one doing you a favor,” Peter points out, crossing his arms and leaning back against the bookshelf.  
  
“So you are,” Elias agrees, and calmly takes off his cufflinks, then his tie. “I hope I don’t seem ungrateful.”  
  
Peter gives him a sigh, letting his eyes sweep over the familiar angular body, and all the ways it’s changed since the last time Peter had him. It’s been--what, four, five years? Not so many as ten. He’d remember that much. He looks--older, sure, but also _better_. There’s a banked excitement in him that Peter doesn’t think he’s seen since Elias was Jonah, and everything was new to him.  
  
Elias drops the cufflinks into a little dish no doubt intended for the purpose, then rolls up his sleeves as he crosses the office to the bookshelf. He takes Peter’s face in his hands, strokes his thumb against Peter’s lower lip. “I’m grateful,” he murmurs, and Peter nips at his thumb.   
  
“Prove it,” Peter suggests, and Elias rolls his eyes again before pressing a real kiss to Peter’s lips, winding his arms around Peter’s neck.  
  
Peter has missed this.   
  
“I missed this,” Peter says out loud, because frankly Elias is subtle enough for both of them.  
  
“You didn’t think of me once,” Elias corrects him, and that’s also true.  
  
It’s hard to remember what he feels for Elias when Elias isn’t there. That’s nothing really to do with Elias, and barely anything to do with Peter--so much of the work involves numbness, and nothing. He does enjoy the pleasurable stab of feeling returning to him in a rush of pins and needles. He likes loss, and he likes longing, but neither of them ache quite as well as the reality of Elias Bouchard in his arms, sighing into his mouth.

Peter crowds Elias up against his own desk, happy to see his own sun-browned hands rucking up that tailored shirt, shoving down his trousers, touching all that pale librarian skin. 

“I’m not a librarian,” Elias reminds him for the thousandth time, casting an annoyed look over his shoulder as Peter strokes possessively over his hole with two fingers, the way Elias likes it. “I’ve never--ah--been a librarian. I _employ_ \--” a pause for the conspicuous absence of a bitten-back sound “--a full library staff.” 

“When’s the last time you spent a day outdoors,” Peter counters, and bites down on the meat of Elias’s shoulder. Elias shudders.

Peter’s favorite part of these little interludes is the part where Elias pretends none of it moves him at all. Where Elias does his level best to imply that Peter’s cock splitting him open is at best a convenient perk to their business arrangement--the thing he _really_ cares about--while clinging to Peter like he’s a life jacket in a storm.  
  
This is--this feels--different. 

The trappings are all the same, the surface of their interaction no different than always, so it takes him a while to realize it, but by the time Elias is on his knees with Peter’s cock buried in his throat, he thinks he knows what it is.  
  
Elias isn’t in pain.  
  
He’s got his eyes closed, a dreamy expression on his face as Peter uses his mouth, but nothing about it is--hurting him.  
  
Peter reaches out with a little icicle of loneliness, feeling for the familiar frustrated core between Elias’s ribs, the part that is reserved for sheer longing--and finds it exactly where he expects it to be. If anything the want he finds is sharper than usual, heated and tense, like Elias has some expectation of return. Elias makes a muffled sound when Peter touches it, and pulls off. “That’s not for you, I’m afraid,” he says, voice rough with use.  
  
Peter blinks at him, and Elias smiles, returns to the task at hand. A familiar white mist seeps into Peter’s chest, and he inhales against the feeling.  
  
So.  
  
Elias has finally fallen out of love with him. 

That’s--fine, obviously.  
  
A little disappointing, but it’s not like their arrangement _requires_ it. Peter will just have to find something else to feed on.  
  
He takes one of the statement givers on his way out, and decides he _is_ going to have the freckled lad over Elias’s desk, when the deal goes into effect. He blames the newly signed paperwork for the foul mood he’s in for the rest of the day.  
  
*  
  
He follows Martin to the hospital once, because his grief and his longing sharpen the closer to his Jonathan he gets, and Peter likes to do his research when he plans to toy with someone for more than a few weeks.  
  
Martin sits next to the Archivist’s bed and thinks about holding his hand but doesn’t, and instead reads to him from a dry book on architecture for a while--interesting to Peter only because Martin finds it dreadfully dull, and is suffering through the pages only because it was the last book left on Jon’s desk. After a while Martin puts the book down, rubs his eyes with his hands, and then reaches into his bag for--ah. For a statement and a tape recorder. Good instincts, even if the execution is poor. Peter feels a little tug of something that might be fondness.  
  
While Martin reads the statement, Peter turns his attention to the Archivist. He isn’t very interesting, lying on the hospital bed as still as death but warm as life, like the girl in the glass coffin. He looks deceptively human, his Corruption scars and his Desolation-mangled hand an excellent mimic of fragility, unless you know how to look. 

Martin doesn’t notice, of course, but as he’s reading the Archivist goes from complete stillness to slight movement, his eyes moving rapidly under their lids, like he’s having a nightmare.  
  
Which of course he is.  
  
Curious, Peter reaches into the Archivist, looking for whatever makes him the most lonely.  
  
He finds a little bubble of misery in the Archivist’s throat, and prods at it. He finds a curly-haired girl crying--lost love, predictable, boring--and an old woman sitting silently with him at the dinner table--more interesting; parental resentment always is--and he’s just getting to the good stuff, to the Archivist’s worry about his own humanity, whether he’s _being a person correctly_ , a subtle line of self-loathing that leads all the way back to the Archivist watching someone else walk into his death scene--when he’s abruptly and very firmly rebuffed.  
  
One minute he’s wrist-deep in the Archivist’s self-hatred and the next he’s been shoved so completely out of the man’s psyche that he almost falls out of the fog in surprise.  
  
Surely Elias _expected_ him to play with the Archivist. Or why give him the damn Institute while he does whatever it is that needs doing from a prison cell?  
  
Martin finishes reading, and waits, tense and expectant--but as soon as the statement ends the Archivist subsides back into not-quite death. Peter absently relishes the moment when Martin accepts that nothing he’s done has helped, enjoys Martin’s exhausted sobs in a distracted way.   
  
As soon as Martin leaves, he steps out of the fog.  
  
He touches the Archivist’s sleeping face, works the man’s jaw open with his thumb.  
  
The Archivist opens his eyes, but they aren’t his.  
  
“I don’t enjoy having to repeat myself,” Elias says with the Archivist’s mouth, obviously annoyed.  
  
“You don’t want me to touch,” Peter agrees, pulling up a chair. He smiles down at Elias, then strokes a stray curl back from the Archivist’s forehead, making a point of twining it around his finger first. “I see we’re feeling possessive today.”  
  
“He is not for you,” Elias says, cold. He doesn’t like to give warnings, and he’s given Peter three. “You won’t enjoy the consequences if you cross me.”  
  
It occurs to Peter that he is miserable. He hasn’t been really miserable in ages. Maybe not since he was Freddy.  
  
Elias is still watching him. 

Peter makes himself shrug. “What about after he wakes up?”  
  
“I expect Jonathan will be perfectly capable of taking care of himself,” Elias says, and that’s really what gives him away. Oh, the tone is perfectly crisp--perfectly Elias--but he can’t cover up the slight dilation of his pupils, the body’s little betrayal of perfect lust. “Should the occasion arise.” 

It’s the lure of the Watcher’s Crown, Peter is well aware. It’s near enough to blot out many other concerns, and of course it fits Elias’s desires in other ways: the Archivist certainly doesn’t love him back, so there’s the masochism. The Archivist does _belong_ to him, of course, so there’s the sadism, plus a great deal more satisfaction than practically anyone else could offer. He’ll even get to grieve the man when he dies, assuming they don’t actually manage to complete their ritual. Really, it’s incredible Elias hasn’t fallen in love with an Archivist before. Peter wants to put out Jonathan Sims’ eyes with his thumbs.  
  
“Peter,” Elias says softly, and it tugs at a thread in Peter’s chest. 

“As you like,” Peter says, deliberately casual, and makes a show of resettling the hospital blanket around Jonathan Sims’ chest, fluffing the pillow underneath his head.  
  
Elias is still watching him when he leaves, the Archivist’s eyes glittering in his hospital bed.  
  
*  
  
Peter’s never been in love before. He doesn’t think.  
  
_Is_ this love, he asks himself, yanking hard on Martin Blackwood’s hair, thinking bitterly about Elias, cool and untouchable in his prison cell. How do you tell the difference between love and jealousy? The fog in his chest is cold as the arctic, and it _aches_.  
  
Martin gags, and Peter stops tugging, pets his spit-slippery cheek instead. Martin has just walked away from the man he loves for the fifth time this week, for what he thinks is a higher purpose. He cried for three whole minutes in the toilet afterward, and when he finished felt more drained and empty than he did at his mother’s funeral.  
  
Good thing he has Martin to feed his god, or else he might start to look tempting himself. 

*  
  
“All right,” Elias says, when Peter finally responds to the summons. “That’s enough of your sulking.”  
  
“I’m not _sulking_ ,” Peter says, settling into the plastic visitor’s chair.  
  
“Lie to yourself all you like,” Elias says with amused certainty, “But you know you can’t lie to me.”  
  
“Would I do that?” Peter asks, and sips from the latte he’s brought with him. It’s from Elias’s favorite shop. He won’t take it through the plastic barrier unless he’s directly asked. 

Elias sighs. “I assume everything is going to plan.” 

“Hollyhocks and roses,” Peter says, because really, if Elias is going to accuse _him_ of pettiness, he can stop pretending he hasn’t obsessively observed every detail of what goes on in his Institute outside of Peter’s immediate presence. 

Elias raises an eyebrow. “Do we need to have a conversation?” he asks, steepling his fingers. He’s actually wearing handcuffs, but Peter wouldn’t be at all surprised it they were for effect. 

“You tell me,” Peter says, just to annoy him, and Elias rolls his eyes.  
  
“Very well,” Elias says, then asks him: “ **Why are you angry with me**?”  
  
Elias does _ask_ things of him, from time to time, just like he can’t help himself from occasionally dipping a finger inside Peter’s thoughts, tasting whatever he finds. Peter has had a few recurring nightmares about Elias over the centuries, although it’s hardly bothered him, and eventually the dreams are eaten by the fog. 

“Because I’m in love with you,” Peter says resentfully. 

Elias smiles at him. “I know. **Why specifically**?” 

Peter takes a vindictive sip of Elias’s latte. “Because you’re not in love with me. Yes, yes, how the tables have turned. Do you _want_ me to send you to an isolation chamber for the next month?” 

Elias ignores that. “You’re being very childish, considering.”  
  
Peter’s aware.  
  
Elias leans forward in his seat, conspiratorial. “Would you like to know the worst part?” He doesn’t force this one, so Peter is spared the indignity of saying yes.  
  
“You loved me all along,” Elias says with poisonous sweetness, and _really_ the worst part is that Peter doesn’t even know if he’s lying. “You just didn’t notice until it was, ah. Inconvenient.”

Peter steps through the plastic barrier separating them. “That doesn’t sound like me,” he says. The fog writhes inside him, cold and hungry. It doesn’t care what feeds it, so long as it is fed. 

“Don’t be too upset,” Elias says, visibly delighted by his own cruelty. “I didn’t notice either.”  
  
“How embarrassing for you,” Peter says, and grabs Elias’s grinning face in his hands, yanking him up into a kiss. Elias yields for him immediately, twining his cuffed hands around Peter’s neck with a clink of chain that is as much a threat as a necessity. 

“You enjoy being a thorn in my side,” Peter accuses him eventually, kissing his way down Elias’s jaw.  
  
“Immensely,” Elias assures him, his hands clawing into Peter’s shoulders, the chain pressed tight and cold against Peter’s neck. The fog is visibly rising in the cell around them now; it’s already up to their knees. “Now--why don’t you let me--resolve the conflict?”  
  
Peter makes a skeptical sound into Elias’s neck, then licks the shell of his ear. “Are you going to let me blind you?” he murmurs against the wet skin. “I could freeze your Archivist to death. I’d even let you keep him in a glass case somewhere, perfectly preserved.” Elias shivers, and Peter can tell part of him likes the idea. “Whenever you wanted you could take him out and--look at him.” 

“You’re such a _brute_ ,” Elias says with a kind of fond mockery. “No, I’m going to keep Jonathan. Anything else is out of the question.” 

Peter bites down on his earlobe in punishment, and now the fog is up to their waists. The frost is stinging at his legs, and Peter really has no idea what’s going to happen next. He can’t remember the last time he lost this much control. He slams Elias against the plastic barrier of his cell, only now it looks like a mirror, reflecting a small infinity of Peters and Eliases back at him, absolutely all of them wickedly, savagely miserable. “Then how, pray tell,” Peter hisses, shoving his knee between Elias’s thighs, “do you intend to fix things?” 

Elias grinds into him with a little stifled noise that is clearly meant to be dignified, and Peter--well, Peter _probably_ loves him for it, if he can believe Elias. Peter knows what it means to be loved but not what it means to love, not unless love is wanting to devour Elias so completely that no one else can look at him again, not unless it’s about wanting something impossible like Elias’s eyes on his tongue and his heart in Peter’s belly. The fog is up to their necks, and Elias is clearly already finding it difficult to breathe.  
  
“Well,” Elias gasps, arching up into Peter and tilting his mouth up to the clear air, “I thought you might marry me.”  
  
Peter stares at him. “What?” 

The fog swallows them both up with a cold swooping sensation, like the shock of water sealing over the crown of your dry head. Peter finds himself standing with Elias on a vast, snowy plain. The snow stretches out for miles in every direction, with nothing to break up the cold: there isn’t even a wind or a cloud in the midnight sky, just a baleful moon. 

“Marry me,” Elias repeats, but as Peter looks at him he realizes it isn’t Elias at all, but Jonah, looking exactly as he did the day he died, eighty if he’s a day. He might even be wearing the same clothes.

“Don’t be absurd,” Mordechai replies. It occurs to him that the moon is not a moon, but a great yellow Eye, staring at them out of the dark. “We’d kill each other within a year.”   
  
Jonah laughs at him softly. He steps forward and takes Mordechai’s hands in his, and his skin is cold as the grave. “Do it anyway,” Jonah suggests. 

“You don’t love me,” Mordechai counters, squeezing Jonah’s gnarled hands as tight as he can, just to feel anything against the cold. 

Jonah shrugs dismissively, like this is an easy thing to overlook. “You feed your god,” he says, like it’s that simple, as if Mordechai won’t need to feed twice as often to make up for the constant low-grade dissolution of his essence, an ouroboros of heartache. “And I’ll feed mine.” _Jonah_ , of course, need only glut himself on the sight of Mordechai’s debasement. He smiles, prim but wicked, and that’s all Elias. “If you’re too much trouble, there’s always divorce.”  
  
The trouble is, Mordechai thinks he's going to enjoy being slowly devoured by his own god, because Jonah's masochism is apparently _infectious_.

“Fine,” Mordechai growls, and drags Jonah close, and that’s honestly already more of a vow than anything done in a church, the two of them lonely in the cold and together under the moon’s watchful Eye. “ _Fine_ , you impossible bastard--”  
  
\--And he means _God, Jonah, if I could love anyone it would be you_ \--

Jonah stops his mouth, and when Peter opens his eyes again he’s trembling with cold, and they are back in prison, and Elias is smug and well-kissed in his arms, idly stroking the back of Peter’s neck with one thumb.  
  
“There,” Elias says, satisfied. “That should settle things for a while.” 

Peter can’t stop shivering. “I’m--going to--kill you one day,” he manages, both because it’s true and because he isn’t sure this settles anything at all.  
  
Elias kisses the fragile skin beside Peter’s right eye. “You’re going to marry me,” he corrects, and smiles when Peter huffs an annoyed breath into his shoulder. He spreads his hand against the back of Peter’s freezing neck, warm and real. **“Do you love me**?”  
  
“Yes,” Peter says, jaw clenched.  
  
Elias’s eyes glitter, and Peter knows what he’s going to say before he says it. It’s what he would do, in Elias’s place. “I love you,” Elias murmurs. 

The Watcher’s Crown is going to _fail_ , Peter thinks savagely, and then you _will_. 

He kisses Elias so he won’t have to call him a liar. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make me happy. :)


End file.
